Implicit Association Test (Race)

Introduction

Social psychologists have long been interested in the measurement of human attitudes. Attitudes reflect a general evaluation of a class of individuals or objects (Smith & Fabringer, 2000). Despite the inherent drawbacks, psychologists have traditionally used self-report measures to measure attitudes.

Recently, researchers have begun to use less direct measures of attitudes
of the cognitive processes underlying judgment. Greenwald, McGhee and Schwartz (1998)
pioneered the use of implicit association tests. Implicit association tests (IATs)
measure the relative ease with which people are able to make associations between
certain groups of people (e.g., older adults) and the concepts of "good" and "bad."
Ease of association, measured by judgment speed, is taken as evidence for an
implicitly-held attitude toward that social group. For example, researchers
interpret the finding that people are quicker to associate the term "good",
with the term "young", rather than with the term "old" as evidence of a generally-held
bias in favor of youth. The IAT method is useful for measuring a variety of attitudes
including gender, race, and political constructs (Nosek, Greenwald, & Banaji, 2005).
The version of the IAT in this experiment measures implicit associations of race,
which was one of the first topics investigated by the developers of the IAT--Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji (1995).

Design

Participants complete two types of tasks. Each task requires participants to categorize
words or pictures. A single keystroke (either 1 or 2) is used to make face categorizations
and word categorizations. The first type of task requires correct racial classification
of a person in a photograph, as shown in Figure 1. Similarly, participants classify words
on the basis of 'good' or 'bad' as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure 2

The second task requires each participant to classify a photo or stimulus
using a combined set of terms (e.g., is the person in the photograph
African American or is the connotation of the adjective Good;
is the person in the photograph European American or is the connotation
of the adjective Bad). For example, if a photo of an African American is
presented as a stimulus, the participant must decide whether to indicate
this photo as African American/Good or European American/Bad.
An example of this task is presented Figure 3.

Figure 3

In the first set of test trials, European-American is paired with Good and African-American with Bad.
This type of test trial is called a "stereotype congruent trial" because the racial stereotypes that
have been held historically by the majority culture in the USA have assigned negative attributes to
Blacks and positive attributes to Whites. The other type of test trial, illustrated in Figure 3, is
a "stereotype non-congruent trial", in which European-American is paired with Bad and African-American
with Good. Thus during the course of the experiment, the 1-key might be used for European-American faces
and Good words, African-American faces and Good words, or any of the other combinations of Face and Word
categories. Based on the data from these two tests, one can determine how the category combinations affect speed of performance.

Example Data Analyses

The data collected from the IAT study is shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4

The first column provides the participant ID number, or
the number that each person receives upon completion
of the experiment. Data in columns 2-5 are relatively self-explanatory: participant's class affiliation
(linked by an Class ID), gender, age, and date of participation.

The column labeled preference is an indication of how the
person reported their feelings about individuals on the basis of race. If the participant declined to indicate his or her warmth toward
a particular group, you will see the word "Decline" in the column next to the participant's
information. The possible values represent the following conditions:

In the column labeled warmth, participants reported how warmly they feel toward each group.
The ratings range from 0 (coldest) to 10 (warmest). The Warmth number is the difference between
the two ratings made on the Black and White scales. If the difference score is positive it means the Warmth
score was greater for Whites than Blacks. Negative scores imply more warmth toward Blacks and scores of 0 indicate equal warmth toward both races.
Finally, data are in columns labeled
congruent and incongruent. Data in these columns reflect the average time (averaged across trials)
it takes to complete the task. Faster times reflect implicitly held attitudes because the response
times are believed to reflect strength of association in semantic memory.

This experiment measures implicit attitudes about race. An investigator can use
a repeated measures t-test to compare the effects of the stereotype congruent and the stereotype non-congruent stimuli.

Applications/Extensions

Many people are surprised by the results of the IAT.
Someone may not hold explicit biases based on race, yet
still pair 'good' terms more quickly with faces representing
one race than those representing the other. Most often, particularly
when the participant is White, the bias is in the direction of the
stereotype-congruent pairing (when white faces are paired with "good"
words and black faces with "bad"). This type of activity illustrates
the pervasiveness and potential subtlety of cultural stereotypes in our
society, and provides opportunity for discussion of factors that may
underlie performance on the IAT as well as the nature of the constructs
the test purports to measure. More information about the validity of and
questions associated with the IAT appears on
A. Greenwald's homepage.

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